Beyond Silence: When Courage Meets Curriculum: The Story of #LIMEPakistan’s Pilot in Mardan
“I was only twelve years old and very scared. I thought I got some kind of injury or illness, but I had my first period. I want girls to be guided before their first period so that they don’t have any fear or misunderstanding during their first period experience like me.”
Kainat Ramzan
9th Grade
This powerful reflection from Kainat Ramzan, a 9th-grade student from a local government school, captures a pervasive and unfortunate reality. Sadly, Kainat’s story is far from unique. Our survey across middle and high schools found that 57.2% of students never received any information about menstrual hygiene management (MHM) before their first period. The result: confusion, anxiety, and avoidable trauma that too many girls in Pakistan still face.
The Unseen Crisis: Why LIME Pakistan is Essential
The #40in4Campaign unearthed a startling, multi-layered crisis in Pakistan. Across more than 40 educational institutions we engaged, not a single one had formally organized MHM sessions before our intervention. This revelation underscored severe systemic gaps:
– Period Poverty: Millions of girls and women lack access to essential menstrual products.
– Expensive sanitary products: Girls and women reduce their risk of infection when they have access to reasonably priced and safe sanitary products to control their periods.
– Unsupportive School Environments: Infrastructure is often inadequate, and the topic remains taboo.
– Lack of Awareness: Widespread myths and misinformation persist.
– Non-existent Women’s Public Leadership: There’s a dire need for female advocates in this crucial area.
– Teacher Capacity Deficit: Educators are ill-equipped to address menstrual health in their classrooms.
It’s no wonder that 56% of middle and high school students felt it was rare for teachers to provide guidance on MHM, and 63.48% believed MHM education was “extremely rare” in their communities. This leaves students like Kainat feeling traumatized and anxious about a natural part of life.
Yet, this deficiency is not by choice, but by design. Our campaign surprisingly found that local stakeholders were eager for capacity building and awareness-focused “menstrual health education training. Leveraging Society For Youth’s (SFY) “broad-based model, which builds on relationality for long-term programs, we successfully trained 2,672 students in 42 different schools across 5 cities in Pakistan.
While we acknowledge the normative challenges, SFY’s broad-based model excels at bridging traditional divides—rural/urban, cultural, religious, government/private—when addressing MHM. This approach, built on months of meticulous consultation and fostering a strong social foundation, was key to the #40in4Campaign’s success.
“Across more than 40 educational institutions we engaged,
not a single one had formally organized MHM sessions before our intervention.”
– LIME Session
SFY’s Vision: Schools as Community Anchors
#LIMEPakistan is more than just a training program; it’s about laying the foundation for a robust, effective, and sustainable infrastructure for menstrual healthcare. Our approach is grounded in three core pillars: Capacity Building, Capacity Transferring, and Capacity Sustaining.
We understand that teachers often lack the knowledge and resources to effectively educate girls about menstruation, perpetuating a cycle of myths and stigma. #LIMEPakistan equips them with accurate, up-to-date information. By training these women leaders and creating networks of knowledgeable educators, we’re building a competent team that champions menstrual health and facilitates women’s leadership, reaching a significant number of students and communities.
“Teachers, unexpectedly, were found to be not only ill-prepared but sometimes reinforcing harmful myths. #LIMEPakistan aims to train 1,000 teachers… developing a vast women’s health organizing network and strengthening women’s public leadership infrastructure.”
– LIME Session
Each training session builds on key grassroots organizing principles, central to SFY’s broad- based model. We foster sustainable community development through collective action, redefining schools not merely as educational centers with valuable resources (buildings, teachers) but as socially embedded institutions. Their long-standing credibility, trust, and community relationships are ripe for spearheading effective local community development. This large institutional grassroots organizing approach relies on the community leadership development of schools, making them champions of MHM internally (for students) and externally (for wider communities).
In essence, #LIMEPakistan is fostering a phenomenal, relationality-oriented, grassroots-led, community-based discourse. Local stakeholders aren’t just recipients; they “have a say” and can exercise “veto” over what, where, and how sustainable community development programs unfold. This critically nurtures local individual-collective, social-institutional agency in tackling perennial, sticky, and stigmatized problems like MHM.
Through this intensive, deliberatively complex model, #LIMEPakistan deploys all available resources—material, non- material, financial—to build a large-scale infrastructure of partnerships, enabled by mutual accountability, to fill the gaps in students’ menstrual health needs.
“Local stakeholders aren’t just recipients; they ’have a say’ and can exercise ‘veto’ over ‘what, where, and how’ sustainable community development programs unfold.”
– LIME Session
“This intensive, deliberatively complex model… builds a large-scale infrastructure of partnerships, enabled by mutual accountability, to fill the gaps in students’ menstrual health needs.”
– LIME Session
LIME Pakistan: Our Solution in Action – The Mardan Pilot
Society For Youth recently completed the successful Pilot Program of #LIMEPakistan in Mardan.
The first training took place on December 18th, 2023, at Mardan Institute of Allied and Health Sciences, with teachers from Oriental Nursing College, Al Fajar College, SAS Montessori School SMT, and Iqra School participating. The second was at Beacon House School on the 19th, and the third at PIPS International School on the 30th of December 2023. In total, 46 teachers were served through these pilot sessions. All participating teachers received #LIMEGuides, our culturally relevant menstrual education curriculum, along with eco- friendly, reusable, sustainable period products (SafePads). They engaged in a critical and comprehensive examination of menstrual health education. The Pilot Study meticulously addressed issues, challenges, and opportunities for improving MHM. Teachers discussed bodily and hormonal changes during puberty in both males and females, identifying a significant lack of awareness about menstruation. Importantly, they tackled infrastructural problems, access to menstrual products, and the crucial role of schools in addressing period poverty and providing reliable scientific knowledge to young girls. The training included practical activities such as preparing DIY period kits, effectively managing period pain, and initiating efforts to make school toilets MHM-friendly. Participants also discussed the importance of nutrition.
LIME and Pedagogy: The Revolutionary Curriculum
At the heart of our multi-layered strategy is the #LIMEGuide. Divided into three core modules—Menstruation and Puberty, Myths and Challenges, and Menstrual Management—the #LIMEGuide is far more than a traditional menstrual education curriculum. It’s the product of months of strenuous, meticulous peer review and critical analysis by experts from diverse medical colleges and universities across Pakistan.
The guide is a centerpiece of Society For Youth’s ingenuity in menstrual education curriculum. Its focus on menstrual health education and hygiene management spans up-to-date scientific knowledge, quizzes, engaging activities, and case studies, all guided by principles of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical consciousness.
With more than 40 activities—some designed for teachers, others for cultivating healthy classroom environments—and a dozen case studies, teachers are explicitly centered as co- generative actors in empowering students. The #LIMEGuide doesn’t just focus on transformational capacity building but truly prioritizes and encourages systems thinking in education and Institutional capacity development. Teachers aren’t passive recipients; they’re active stakeholders in addressing menstrual health education gaps and deficiencies.
Through these activities, teachers not only identified cultural myths and taboos, healthy MHM practices, and the value of sustainable products, but also delved deeper into how they can spearhead a more vibrant and dynamic institutional conversation around menstrual health.
“With more than 40 activities—some designed for teachers, others for cultivating healthy classroom environments—and a dozen case studies, teachers are explicitly centered as ”co-generative actors” in empowering students”
– LIME Session
The Mardan Training: Challenges and Systemic Solutions
While system-wide disparities in menstrual health education are widely discussed, the more institutional factors—workforce development, curriculum policies, organizational incentivizing, and inter-organization stakeholder ownership—are often neglected. Programs frequently focus on demand-side symptoms, rarely bolstering supply-side strengths.
“While system-wide disparities in “menstrual health education” are widely discussed, the more “institutional” factors—workforce development, curriculum policies, organizational incentivizing, and inter-organization stakeholder ownership—are often neglected
– LIME Session
“It’s not enough to compile a culturally relevant curriculum that resonates with teachers if a larger “healthcare advocacy and inter-institutional infrastructure” doesn’t exist.
– LIME Session
For instance, the lack of scalable menstrual healthcare capacity isn’t simply due to cultural factors. It demands a systems-level approach for a whole life direction. While the Mardan Pilot Study successfully built teacher capacity through educational training, we also confronted key challenges. One-off training can’t substitute for serious gaps in system-wide capacity nurturing. It requires sustained, continuous investment to train and refine muscles around women’s health advocacy, women’s public leadership capacity, and locally rooted grassroots organizing mechanisms.
“The promise of the curriculum is realized not just by integrating revolutionary pedagogical components, but by ensuring a diverse array of identities is present for its fermentation and synthesis.”
– LIME Session
Diverse Voices Transformative Impact Lesson from Mardan
The Mardan Pilot Program offers a small but powerful glimpse into our broader, diverse approach. It’s especially noteworthy because Mardan hasn’t historically been a hub for such initiatives. This isn’t about simplistic liberal-conservative binaries, but about truly understanding the grassroots realities, local aspirations, and future visions of our communities.
SFY takes immense care in bringing together a diverse set of stakeholders, moving beyond normative analyses of challenges in fractured or sensitive local contexts. We successfully engaged 7 local educational institutions in this Pilot Program. Interestingly, 5 of these institutions had male principals who actively and enthusiastically supported the program, while 3 had female principals. The participating teachers teach various subjects, from sciences to languages, and come from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, spanning rural and urban areas. In a cultural landscape where NGOs can sometimes face conspiratorial analyses, this diversity significantly bolsters the effectiveness and legitimacy of our programs.
The promise of the curriculum is realized not just by integrating revolutionary pedagogical components, but by ensuring a diverse array of identities is present for its fermentation and synthesis. Having teachers from varied backgrounds goes beyond mere pressure-testing pedagogical modules. It allows for substantial and eye-opening cross-pollination of ideas, where social actors from different academic backgrounds, age groups, and socio-economic segments share experiences, challenges, and brainstorm solutions. This leads to broad-based solidarity, especially impactful in a predominantly Pakhtun ethnic context. This intensive, grassroots engagement fosters youth leadership and community engagement and cultivates political, social, and institutional self-agency. The diverse social locations of these teachers and institutions also enable us to cater to the needs of a wider subset of student populations across the city.
Paving the Way: Projected & Achieved Impacts
The #LIMEPakistan Pilot Program’s success in uniting 7 different local institutions must be underscored. Our broad-based model prioritizes indigenous leadership over external models. We don’t work in a community without equally invested social actors, stakeholders, and leaders from that community. While resource and time-consuming, this strategic outreach and investment in relationships is imperative for long-term sustainable community development and a form of building community resilience.
Our central focus throughout the #LIMEPakistan project is to foster inter-institutional collaboration, breaking through silos of institutional inertia. We prompt local stakeholders to think regionally, provincially, and nationally about issues like menstrual health education. When school principals and directors are convinced of the promise of initiatives like #LIMEPakistan, it becomes far more pragmatic to invest in institutional capacity development and systems thinking in education. We’re not just redefining schools as front- line resource centers for broad-based coalitions to tackle menstrual health; these partnerships can also be leveraged for system-wide curriculum reform and investing in sustainable period products. The Mardan Pilot is concrete proof that these sessions are effective, echoing stories and reflections from our previous #40in4Campaign.
Acknowledging Champions and Looking Ahead
The Mardan Pilot Program was a tremendous success, and we extend our deepest gratitude to all the principals of the participating and hosting institutions: Saif Ullah (Oriental Nursing School), Sardar Bacha (MINAMS), Usman Nazar (IQRA Ghalader Campus), Waqar Ali (SAS), Nadeem (AL Fajar), Saima Hameed (Beaconhouse), and Huma (PIPS) in Mardan.
We extend special thanks to the #LIMEPakistan Pilot Study facilitator, Shazia Sardar, for her dedication and leadership. SFY is also proud of and thanks SFY leaders Nimra, Nida, Fareeha, and Zainab for their assistance with the training.
Society For Youth has only just begun; the road ahead is long and challenging. This progress would not have been possible without the unwavering commitment of these local leaders who not only recognize the urgent need for menstrual health education but actively invest in addressing it by stewarding their institutions. Their dedication exemplifies the power
of transformative education and its potential to foster critical consciousness and self-agency Within communities.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————
About LIME Pakistan & SFY
LIME Pakistan is a transformative initiative by Society For Youth, dedicated to empowering communities and fostering sustainable change in menstrual health management across Pakistan. Through its unique Schools as Community Anchors model, LIME Pakistan aims to build local leadership, integrate comprehensive menstrual health education, and challenge societal taboos to ensure that every girl and woman can experience menstruation with dignity and knowledge.
Society For Youth (SFY) is a non-profit organization committed to fostering sustainable community development through grassroots organizing, education, and empowering local leadership. SFY’s broad-based model emphasizes relationality and collective action, working to address complex social challenges and build resilient communities from within.
To learn more about our work, donate, or support our mission, please feel free to reach out to us via info@society4youth.org. You can also visit the #40in4Campaign website for more insights into the foundational research that led to LIME Pakistan.